Database Reference
In-Depth Information
12. Case Studies
We have provided some case studies of various companies that are using Cas-
sandra internally to give you a few ideas of the way other people think about Cas-
sandra. Information will range from how Cassandra applications are built to how
the deployments and data modeling are done.
Ooyala
Evan Chan and Al Tobey
At Ooyala, we deliver personalized video experiences across many types of plat-
forms. We are a leader in online video management, publishing, analytics, and
monetization. Our goal in analytics is to give content owners rich, actionable in-
sights that increase their video engagement.
If you have watched a video on espn.com , you have probably used Ooyala tech-
nology.
The first pass at Ooyala's analytics was built on MySQL. It worked well for
a while but quickly started to cause problems when MapReduce jobs hammered
so many writes to the database that slave replication wasn't able to keep up. The
database infrastructure couldn't take the abuse, and it was time to look for a new
solution.
Before we decided to follow through with using Cassandra (which was only 0.4
at the time), we investigated a few other possibilities, including HBase and other
NoSQL solutions. We ultimately decided on Cassandra.
Cassandra was chosen because it presents the BigTable data model that was fa-
miliar to many of our engineers. It also had a decent Ruby driver, which fit well
into the development platform that was in place. The Cassandra user community
was relatively active. Finally, Cassandra had no trouble taking a beating from our
Hadoop cluster on writes.
We started using Cassandra for analytics aggregates, and the use cases multi-
plied. The analytics module in our video player reports playback information back
to our analytics collection servers, and the data is written into log files. From there,
the following takes place:
Logs are aggregated into metrics via Hadoop and written into Cassandra.
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